Information, from stock quotes, tennis scores, utility bills, etc. comes in many different forms and formats. In order for any information to be useful, however, it must be presented in a way that makes sense to the human mind. Raw data without context or format is meaningless, representing only wasted effort.
This need to analyze information has led to categorizing and formatting data in many different, yet comprehensible, ways. The aforementioned stock quotes appear on the trading floor as a standardized set of abbreviations and numbers; tennis scores are reported in agreed-upon terms such as "love" and "set"; and utility bills are shown in terms of dollars and cents. Despite this standardization in terms, the formatting, grouping, and method of delivery of information is often widely variable. With the advent of the digital age and widespread use of the computer, this has become an even more common problem. Information may be transmitted on a compact disc, via floppy disks, or across the Internet; it may be compressed by any number of different commercial utilities, placed in a database to be retrieved or sorted via specific data fields, or electronically transcribed according to a proprietary interface. Thus, a person may find it difficult, if not impossible, to accurately associate information with the elements or parts of a business organization that require this information.
An example may serve to effectively illustrate the difficulty of accurately and quickly associating information with selected elements or parts of a business organization, such as subsidiaries, divisions, departments, branch offices, and individual members of the business organization. Consider a corporation with branches in multiple states, each of which has subsidiary departments or offices located in different towns. From branch to branch, the corporation may find that different service providers offer the lowest rate for different services. Indeed, the preferred provider may vary from office to office within the same town based on location, volume of use, incentives offered, and the like. In such cases, the corporation may elect to engage multiple service providers. This in turn leads to multiple bills, all containing similar yet unique information, being sent to a single customer. Further, it is likely that these bills come in different formats and are differently organized. A customer may wish to standardize the costs incurred by his organization; a common way to do this is to assign the charges billed for every service to the element or part of the organization which incurred the charges. In order to accurately pass the cost of such services on to each subsidiary, division, department, or branch office of the business organization, the billing information must be correlated with individual uses of each service by the appropriate subsidiary, division, department, or branch offices of the corporation.
One possibility for associating the charges with the organization's constituent elements is that all bills are printed and sent directly to an accounting department, which then collates the bills, breaks the charges down by service and corporate element and assigns charges accordingly. Depending on the size of the corporation and the volume of calls, this task could employ dozens of people full-time.
Alternately, the service bills might be delivered encoded on a computer-readable medium, such as a compact disk or magnetic tape. In this manner, a computer could be employed in order to reduce the time necessary to correlate and assign charges to the appropriate corporate elements, such as subsidiaries, divisions, departments, branch offices, or individual members. However, in the case where multiple service providers are used, each service provider is likely to employ its own format when encoding billing information on the computer-readable medium. This necessitates extracting the information separately for each bill, inputting it in a common format into a single database or program, and then correlating the information with the corporate elements as required. This leads to increased cost in terms of both effort and money as a corporation is forced to devote resources to this task.
Rival service providers are unlikely to work together to standardize the format of their billing information. Instead a business organization is faced with little alternative to expending its own resources in order to place information into a common usable format, then correctly associate the billing information with the selected elements of the corporation. Further, this process must be repeated at great expense at every interval in which a set of bills is generated by the multiple service providers.
Additionally, it is often desirable to examine the information associated with a single element of the business organization rather than poring through all of the information associated with an overall organization. For example, the corporation mentioned in the foregoing example may be specifically concerned with the service charges incurred by a single operating division in order to better forecast a budget for an upcoming fiscal year. While the company may request the expense reports reflecting the charges incurred by the division, the information may be buried within the logs and not readily accessible. In such cases a considerable expense must be outlaid in order to search through past service logs, find the appropriate data, and convert it to a usable form.
The costs for accurately associating information with the elements of an organization are not limited to the preceding example. It may be seen that in any situation where information to be associated with individual elements of a business organization is transmitted in differing formats that this problem will be encountered. Stock prices received from various world markets to be correlated with shares held by multiple mutual funds provides yet another example in which the same problem may be encountered and similar costs incurred. Sports scores, banking data, or even the catalog of books in a library are further examples of types of information that come in different formats, yet lend themselves to association with individual elements of an organization.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method which associates and correlates information with the elements of a business organization.
There is a further need for a system and method which associates and correlates information with the elements of a business organization in the most cost-efficient and quickest manner possible.
In particular, there is a need for a system and method which minimizes the number of people required to accomplish the task of correlating information with the elements of a business organization.
There is also a need for a system which allows a user to examine only the information associated with a particular element of an organization.